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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Butoh (舞踏 ,butō^?) is the collective name for a diverse range of activities, techniques and motivations for dance, performance, or movement inspired by the Ankoku-Butoh (暗黒舞踏 ,ankoku butō^?) movement. It typically involves playful and grotesque imagery, taboo topics, extreme or absurd environments, and is traditionally "performed" in white-body makeup with slow hyper-controlled motion, with or without an audience. But there is no set style, and it may be purely conceptual with no movement at all. Its origins have been attributed to Japanese dance legends Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno.

Contents 1 History 2 Butoh in popular culture 3 Koichi Tamano 4 Butoh exercises 5 Defining Butoh 6 Influence 7 International 8 External links 9 References

[edit] History

Butoh appeared first in Japan after the second world war and the student riots there. The roles of authority were being challenged and subverted at this point. It also appeared as a reaction against the contemporary dance scene in Japan, which Hijikata felt was based on imitating the West and Noh and was too superficial.

The first butoh piece was Kinjiki (Forbidden Colours), by Tatsumi Hijikata, which premiered at a dance festival in 1959. Based on the novel of the same name by Yukio Mishima, the piece explored the taboo of homosexuality and paedophilia and ended with a live chicken being held between the legs of Yoshito Ohno (Kazuo Ohno's son) and Hijikata chasing Yoshito off the stage in darkness. Primarily as a result of the misconception that the chicken had died due to strangulation, this piece outraged the audience, and resulted in the banning of Hijikata from the festival where Kinjiki premiered and established him as an iconoclast.

In the very first "butoh" performances, the style was called "Dance Experience" (in English), but in the early Sixties, Hijikata used the term "Ankoku-Buyo" (暗黒舞踊 – dance of darkness) to describe his dance, and later changed the word "buyo," filled with associations of Japanese classical dance to that of "butoh," a long discarded word for dance that originally meant European ballroom dancing^[1].

In later work, Hijikata continued to subvert conventional notions of dance. Inspired by writers such as Yukio Mishima, Lautréamont, Artaud, Genet and de Sade, he delved into grotesquerie, darkness, and decay. Simultaneously, Hijikata explored the transmutation of the human body into other forms, such as animals. He also developed a poetic and surreal choreographic language, butoh-fu (fu means "word" in Japanese), to help the dancer transform into other materials.

The work developed beginning in 1960 by Kazuo Ohno with Tatsumi Hijikata was the beginning of what now is regarded as "Butoh." In Jean Viala's and Nourit Masson-Sekinea's book Shades of Darkness, Kazuo Ohno is regarded as "the soul of Butoh," while Tatsumi Hijikata is seen as "the architect of Butoh." Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno later developed their own styles of teaching separate from each other. Students of each style went on to create many different groups such as Sankai Juku, a Japanese dance group well-known to fans in North America.

Students of these two great artists have been known to show up the differing orientations of their masters. While Hijikata was a fearsome technician of the nervous system influencing input strategies and artists working in groups, Ohno is thought of as a more natural, individual, and nurturing figure who influenced solo artists.

There is much discussion about who should receive the credit for creating Butoh. As artists worked to create new art in all disciplines after World War II, Japan artists and thinkers emerged out of economic and social challenges that produced an energy and renewal of artists, dancers, painters, musicians, writers, and all artists.

A number of people with few formal connections to Hijikata began to call their own idiosyncratic dance "butoh". Among these we can include Iwana Masaki (岩名雅紀), Tanaka Min (田中民), and Teru Goi^[2]. Although all manner of systematic thinking about butoh dance can be found, perhaps Iwana Masaki most accurately sums up the variety of butoh styles:

While 'Ankoku Butoh' can be said to have possessed a very precise method and philosophy (perhaps it could be called 'inherited butoh'), I regard present day butoh as a 'tendency' that depends not only on Hijikata's philosophical legacy but also on the development of new and diverse modes of expression. The 'tendency' that I speak of involved extricating the pure life which is dormant in our bodies.^[3]

Hijikata is often quoted saying what opposition he had to a codified dance: "Since I believe neither in a dance teaching method nor in controlling movement, I do not teach in this manner" (qtd. in Viala 186). However, in the pursuit and development of his own work, it is only natural that a "Hijikata" style of working, and therefore a "method" emerged. Both Mikami Kayo and Maro Akaji have stated that Hijikata exhorted his disciples to not imitate his own dance when they left to create their own butoh dance groups. If this is the case, then his words make sense: there are as many types of butoh as there are butoh choreographers.

Starting in the early 1980s, Butoh experienced a renaissance as Butoh groups began performing outside Japan for the first time. The most famous of these groups is Sankai Juku.

In a performance by Sankai Juku, in which the performers hung upside down from ropes from a tall building in Seattle, Washington, one of the ropes broke, resulting in the death of the performer. The footage was played on national news, whereby Butoh became more widely known in America through the tragedy.^{[citation needed]}. A PBS documentary of a Butoh performance in a cave with no audience further broadened knowledge in America.

In the early 1990s, Koichi Tamano performed atop the giant drum of San Francisco Taiko Dojo inside Grace Cathedral, in an international religious celebration.^{[citation needed]}

Butoh's status at present is ambiguous. Accepted as a performance art overseas, it remains fairly unknown in Japan.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Butoh in popular culture

A Butoh performance choreographed by Yoshito Ohno appears at the beginning of the Tokyo section of Hal Hartley's 1996 film Flirt.

Ron Fricke's experimental documentary film Baraka (1992) features scenes of butoh performance.

In the late 1960s, horror/exploitation director Teruo Ishii hired Hijikata to play the role of a Doctor Moreau-like reclusive mad scientist in his film Horrors of Malformed Men^[4] a role that is mostly performed as dance. The film has remained largely unseen in Japan for forty years because it was viewed as insensitive to the handicapped. ^[5]

Kiyoshi Kurosawa used Butoh movement for actors in his 2001 film Kairo, remade in Hollywood in 2006 as Pulse. The re-make did not feature Butoh.

Butoh performance features heavily in Doris Dörrie's 2008 film Cherry Blossoms, in which a Bavarian man embarks on a journey to Japan to grieve for his late wife and develop an understanding of this performance style for which she held a life-long fascination.

A portrait of Kazuo Ohno appears on the cover of Antony & the Johnsons 2009 album "The Crying Light".

[edit] Koichi Tamano

Principal dancer for Hijikata was Koichi Tamano. Koichi Tamano made his United States debut in 1976 at the “Japan Now” exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Hijikata called Koichi Tamano "the bow-legged Nijinsky", a quote later rendered in English by Alan Ginsberg. Classical Butoh is frequently semi nude, and muscle worshipping Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima considered Koichi Tamano to have the most perfect body among Japanese dancers. Koichi Tamano was declared a national treasure by the Emperor of Japan. Tamano frequently dances atop ten foot tall drum of played by Seiichi Tanaka, Grand Master of San Francisco Taiko Dojo at international taiko festivals.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Butoh exercises

Most butoh exercises use image work to varying degrees. From the razorblades and insects of Ankoku Butoh, to Dairakudakan's threads and water jets, to Seiryukai's rod in the body. There is a general trend towards the body as "being moved," from an internal or external source, rather than consciously moving a body part. A certain element of "control vs. uncontrol" is present through many of the exercises^[6].

Looked at from completely scientific standpoint, this is rarely possible unless under great duress or pain, but as Kurihara points out, pain, starvation, and sleep deprivation were all part of life under Hijikata's method^[7], which may have helped the dancers access a movement space where the movement cues had terrific power. It is also worth noting that Hijikata's movement cues are in general, much more visceral and complicated than anything else since.

Exercises from Japan (with the exception of much of Ohno Kazuo's work) most all have specific body shapes or general postures assigned to them, while almost none of the exercises from Western butoh dancers have specific shapes. This seems to point to a general trend in the West that butoh is not seen as specific movement cues with shapes assigned to them such as Ankoku Butoh or Dairakudakan's technique work, but rather that butoh is a certain state of mind or feeling that influences the body directly or indirectly.

Hijikata did in fact stress feeling through form in his dance, saying, "Life catches up with form"^[8], which in no way suggests that his dance was mere form. Ohno Kazuo, though, comes from the other direction: "Form comes of itself, only insofar as there is a spiritual content to begin with"^[8].

The trend towards form is apparent in several Japanese dance groups, who merely recycle Hijikata's shapes and present butoh that is mere body-shapes and choreography (Viala 100): which would lead butoh closer to Contemporary Dance or Performance Art than anything else. A good example of this is Torifune Butoh-sha's recent works^[9].

A paragraph from butoh dancer Iwana Masaki, whose work shies away from all elements of choreography.

I have never heard of a butoh dancer entering a competition. Every butoh performance itself is an ultimate expression; there are not and cannot be second or third places. If butoh dancers were content with less than the ultimate, they would not be actually dancing butoh, for real butoh, like real life itself, cannot be given rankings^[10].

[edit] Defining Butoh

Critic Mark Holborn has written that Butoh is defined by its very evasion of definition.^[11] The Kyoto Journal variably categorizes Butoh as dance, theater, “kitchen”, or “seditious act”.^[12] The San Francisco Examiner describes Butoh as "unclassifiable" (“strangest, most unclassifiable, and most haunting)”.^[13] The San Francisco Weekly adds the category of a kind of "world" of “restaurant theater” in a skid row context. The SF Weekly article entitled The Bizarre World of Butoh was about former sushi restaurant Country Station, in which Koichi Tamano was “chef”, and Hiroko Tamano "manager". The article begins, “There’s a dirty corner of Mission Street, where a sushi restaurant called Country Station shares space with hoodlums and homeless drunks, a restaurant so camouflaged by dark and filth it easily escapes notice. But when the restaurant is full and bustling, there is a kind of theater that happens inside…”^[14] Butoh frequently occurs in areas of extremes of the human condition, such as skid rows, or extreme physical environments, such as a cave with no audience, remote Japanese cemetery, or hanging by ropes from a skyscraper in front of the Washington Monument.^[15] Hiroko Tamano considers modelling for artists to be Botoh, in which she poses in "impossible" positions held for hours, which she calls "really slow Butoh".^{[citation needed]} The Tamano’s home seconds as a “dance” studio, with any room or portion of yard potentially used. When a completely new student arrived for a workshop in 1989, and found a chaotic simultaneous photo shoot, dress rehearsal for a performance at Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, workshop, costume making session, lunch, chat, and newspaper interview, all "choreographed" into one event by Hiroko Tamano, she ordered the student, in broken English, “Do interview”. The new student was interviewed, without informing the reporter that the student had no knowledge as to what Butoh was. The improvised information was published, “defining” Butoh for the area public. Hiroko Tamano then informed the student that the interview itself was Butoh, and that was the lesson.^{[citation needed]} Such "seditious acts", or pranks in the context of chaos, are Butoh.^[16]

[edit] Influence

Teachers influenced by more Hijikata style approaches tend to use highly elaborate visulizations that can be highly mimetic, theatrical and expressive. A good example of this teaching would be Koichi and Hiroko Tamano, founders of [6]Harupin-Ha Butoh Dance Company(who own and operate the Tamasei Sushi restaurant in San Francisco).

Teachers who have spent time with Ohno seem to be much more eclectic and individual in approach, bearing the mark of their master, perhaps, in tendencies to indulge in wistful states of spiritualized semi-embodiment.

There have however been many unique groups and performance companies influenced by the movements created by Hijikata and Ohno, ranging from the highly minimalist of Sankai Juku, to very theatrically explosive and carnivalesque performance of groups like Dai Rakudakan.

[edit] International

Many Nikkei (or members of the Japanese diaspora), such as Japanese Canadians Jay Hirabayashi of Kokoro Dance, Denise Fujiwara, incorporate butoh in their dance or have launched butoh dance troupes.

Butoh is also created and performed by non-Japanese Canadians – Thomas Anfield and Kevin Bergsma formed BUTOH-a-GO-GO in 1999 billing it a "Second Generation Butoh/Performance Company." Anfield and Bergsma met in 1995 working with Kokoro Dance.

Numerous Butoh companies exist outside of Japan in Europe, Asia, and North and South America. The multimedia, physical theater-oriented group called Ink Boat in San Francisco incorporates humor into their work. The Swedish SU-EN Butoh Company tours Europe extensively. One of the most prominent butoh-influenced performers is the American dancer Maureen Fleming.

[edit] External links

• [7] Kazuo Ohno Dance Studio in Kamihoshikawa, Japan
• [8] BUTOHSanFrancisco producer
• CAVE NY Butoh Festival producer and Buto-Kan initiator
• butoh.net Directory of international butoh artists in English
• BUTOH-a-GO-GO
• Café Reason - Butoh Dance Theatre
• Denise Fujiwara
• Ikuyo Kuroda: Dance Past the Limit Butoh Performance Review - Japan America Society of Greater Philadelphia
• Ink Boat
• [9] Butoh Enthusiast Network. "Not thinking, only soul" -Kazuo Ohno
• LEIMAY Butoh-Kan initiator and Ximena Garnica's performance company
• Kokoro Dance
• Vangeline Theater Butoh Dance company New York
• Video of Poppo, Butoh performer (1990, backed by Nocturnal Emissions)
• Mizu Desierto Butoh Theatre Butoh Dance Theater in Portland, Oregon
• Diego Piñón Butoh Ritual Mexican Dance
• [10] Butoh & Life Mastery Blog
• [11] Maureen Freehill Butoh/Dance Performance in Northwest USA
• Butoh UK

[edit] References